OTTAWA — When Domicile builds its 18-storey condo in the Preston Street neighbourhood, the company hopes to put a little more “Italy” back into the area known as Corso Italia.

The developer has signed up Nicastro’s La Bottega for the ground floor of the building planned for the corner of Pamilla and Rochester streets in Little Italy. An institution in the ByWard Market for two decades, this is the first time La Bottega has accepted a developer’s offer to open a full-fledged second location.

Why did La Bottega bite this time? “Domicile gave us a really good deal,” says co-owner Pat Nicastro. “They made it very advantageous for us.”

And it’s just as advantageous for Domicile, whose president, John Doran, had vowed from the start to include a food retailer in the project. In marketing the popular store as part of the “Nuovo” development (“new” in Italian), Domicile is clearly looking to set its product apart from the forest of towers springing up across the city.

At 5,000 square feet, La Bottega won’t be a full-fledged supermarket — “We don’t sell toilet paper,” Nicastro says — but it will carry a wide range of food, from Italian staples like pasta and olive oil, cheese and meats, but also the basics like milk and eggs.

While the new store will include coffee and sandwich counters, as well as a sit-down café, “we’re retailers first,” says Nicastro, who’s a partner in the store with his cousin, Rocco Nicastro. “We’re still Italian grocers, that’s what we’ve always been.”

The fact that Nicastro is a food retailer may help Domicile with community relations. Nobody’s forcing the developer’s hand — once the city has approved a building permit, there’s no practical need to court neighbourhood goodwill. But it doesn’t hurt. In recent years, the residents in Little Italy have complained that Preston Street is filling up with bars and restaurants. It makes the area a fun place on weekends and evenings, but means locals often have to travel a ways to supply their day-to-day living needs.

So Nicastro says La Bottega Nuovo — as the new location is to be called — will likely carry more fresh produce than the ByWard store, which offers a small complement of Italian-cuisine herbs and vegetables (think basil, tomatoes, garlic).

For a residential builder to sign up a high-end groceteria may not be huge news (other than, perhaps, to Italophiles in the vicinity), but it signals an encouraging trend that’s seeing in-demand services locating in condos.

For years, residents have been told that intensification would bring interesting and necessary shops that would animate the streets of the inner city. Bring enough people into a neighbourhood, goes the theory, and the retailers will follow. But until recently, what we’ve mostly seen are controversially tall developments with, at best, humdrum retail. No one thinks of a Shoppers Drug Mart as “animating”.

But intensification is finally showing signs of reaching a critical point where the services we want — food retailing, in particular — are willing to move in. Consider that a 30,000-square-foot Sobeys is planned for the base of the Claridge project under construction in Centretown, an area that has minimal grocery options.

Late last year, an LCBO opened recently on the ground floor of one of Urban Capital’s buildings near Bank and Gladstone streets, marking the first time the liquor agency has set up shop in a condo complex.

That more interesting retailers are finally moving into tall buildings won’t erase people’s concerns over their height and density. It’s unlikely locals will welcome with open arms the 40-plus storey towers planned for Carling Avenue near Preston just because some cool stores open up on the ground level.

Still, it’s a relief to start seeing some of the positives — and not just the controversies — that come with intensification.

If this welcome trend is to continue, however, the city also has to step up its role in creating lively and livable street fronts, by ensuring that the sidewalk levels of buildings are inviting — no blank walls allowed — as well as setbacks after the first two or three storeys to minimize looming effects. And the city must insist on wider, pedestrian friendly sidewalks. (See Ashcroft’s Richmond Road development just west of Island Park Drive for a sad example of what happens when these principles are ignored.)

As well, if people are moving into the core, as the sprouting up of new business would suggest, then the city has to provide more public amenities, from libraries and recreation centres to parks and even daycares.

Because we can’t leave it up to the La Bottegas and the Sobeys of the world to make an intensified Ottawa not just a place where more of us live, but where life is better.

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